by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 26, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!  Welcome to this very special Sunday, this Celebration Sunday!

For those of you who come with joy in your hearts this day,

may your joy be shared.

For those of you who come with heavy hearts,

may you be lifted up.

For those in search of community,

may you find here the warmth and fellowship that your heart seeks.

Come now, and let us worship together.

I want to begin this morning by thanking Tom Disrud for delivering my sermon in my stead last Sunday, since I had lost my voice.  I particularly wanted you to hear last week’s sermon because it is part of a pair of sermons, of which I’ll preach the second today. 

I want to begin with a story, a true story told me by a very successful lawyer who works for a prestigious firm here in our city.  He said that the lawyers in his office went off for a retreat.  As part of this time of renewal, they  divided into small groups and talked about the one thing they would want to change in their work.  Virtually all of them said the same thing—we want more time at home with our families.  They felt good about the expression of this need, felt hopeful—but when they went back to work the next week, nothing, absolutely nothing, changed in their work lives.  Those billable hours were still required, and everything else in their lives deferred to that.

When we begin to think about how to get at the problems of loneliness and isolation, I think we have to start with the cultural context. Since the Industrial Revolution, when family and community groups were broken up to feed the economic machine in the cities, we have been encouraged to see ourselves in two main ways: as (1) producers of goods and services, and (2) consumers.  If there’s any kind of bottom line characterizing our society, that is it:  we work and we buy.  We give lip service to other values, values such as love and family and generosity of spirit—“reach out and touch someone,” the ad goes—but to actually live by these values—well, that is challenging.  I think we have to be intentional about creating community and closeness, because contemporary life works against it.

Those of us who are parents, those who are teachers, we are being asked to socialize our children into a culture which is in so many ways, life-denying.  Some children start preparing in elementary school to get into a big name college.  The competition, after all, is stiff.  Our children themselves become products.  I think about my two adult sons, now 30 and 31, and I’m concerned about them.  The older son Kash has a wife and 3 ½-year-old child.  His wife would like to stay at home with the child, but they both have to work to make ends meet.  Kash tells me he sits in a cubicle all day and processes paper.  He has no time to mix and mingle with his fellow workers, as he did in his previous job.  He’s thinking about going to graduate school, but doesn’t know what he wants to study.  He can think of no work really compelling enough to give himself to.  He has no time to exercise, no time to socialize.  This is no life for a young husband and father.  I worry about him, and his wife, and my grandson.

No, we cannot dismiss the constraints of our society, you know.  Inevitably, we are a part of our social and cultural context.  What we can do is to become more aware, and to make choices out of that awareness, perhaps unconventional or unpopular choices, but our choices.  Deena Metzger, a brilliant social analyst, writes, “I didn’t realize how thoroughly I <myself> had . . . internalized the hostile systems that surround us, had absorbed so many variations on duality, division, repression, suppression, hierarchy, superiority, intolerance, and violence . . . .”  Can we exist in a violent culture without in some form or other doing violence to others?  Or a racist culture, without being racist?  I don’t think so. As we begin to understand that our unhappiness is not just personal failure, but really the likely consequence of the structures in which we live and work, when we realize what we’re up against, there is then the very real possibility that we might begin to lean in the direction of life and joy.

I see people in this congregation making these choices—I see the Ph.D. mom who is electing to stay home with her young children; I remember the voice of the woman who just the other day said to me, “I’m just not going to buy a car; I’ll get to work by walking and riding the bus”; I hear the story of a man who was a success in corporate America, but who decided that his life was too stressful, and so he went back to school to become a college professor.  And there are more of these stories in this congregation, believe me.  They are heartening, they are inspiring.

Years ago, I knew a man with a ready sense of humor who always answered his phone, “Is that you?”  I always laughed when I heard his voice.  But in a sense, it’s the question I ask when I answer the phone, when I look through my mail, when I look at my e-mail messages.  “Is that you?”  Will I find some declaration of love there, or a check for a million dollars, or a registered letter saying that I have won the Nobel Prize?  (For what, I don’t know.)  You know, will I find something to change my life.  Something to soften me or slow me down or make me a better person.  Something to make me feel less alone.

But the fact is, all the answers will have to come from within.  No one or nothing can save me—or can save you.  I try to pay close attention to my aliveness, to my sensory involvement in the world—that is, how I taste and touch.  I pay attention to the light in my eyes, and the color of my skin, I notice what sets me to loving, and what makes me feel down.  What gives me life, and what takes life from me.  And then I move, according to the signals.

I know that I need, and all human beings need, a safe place where we can be ourselves, a place where we can express our fears and longings without feeling that we’ll be judged.  In The Diary of Anne Frank, you will remember that Anne and her parents and another family are hiding from the Nazis in a very small space.  Anne writes, “My longing to talk to someone became so intense I took it in my head to talk to Peter.  <Peter was the adolescent son of the other family.>  I was afraid he might think me a bore.  I noticed his shy manner and it made me feel very gentle.  I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?”

This need to know and to be known is so strong that it profoundly affects not only our psychological, but also our physical selves.  Dr. Dean Ornish writes, “I am not aware of any other factor in medicine that has a greater impact on our survival than the healing power of love and intimacy.  Not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress <reduction>, not genetics . . . .”  He believes that the real epidemic in modern culture is heart disease—the spiritual heart disease of loneliness, isolation, alienation. 

Paradoxically, we fail to disclose ourselves, because we want so much to be loved, and we fear that when we are known, we might be rejected.  But in order to be loved, we must make ourselves known.  Not just anywhere, anytime.  But when we sense we can trust another.  I’ve never been a person who wanted lots of friends—but those friends I have, I can tell anything to, and I treasure their presence in my life.  I keep up with them.  I tell them I love them.  I’m finding I’m saying that much more freely these days.  Just putting into words what I’m feeling, with no expectation: just saying, “I love you.” 

But in order to love and be loved, we must drop the mask of self-sufficiency and become vulnerable.  Writer Marshall Hodge tells of a woman who came up to him after one of his lectures, and said, “I have to talk to you about my boyfriend problems.”  They sat down, and she began telling him her troubles.  Then she stopped for a moment and said to Hodge, “I am now taking steps never to get hurt again.”  And he said to her, “In other words, you are taking steps never to love again.”  She thought he misunderstood, and she said, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.  I just don’t want to get hurt anymore.  I don’t want pain in my life.”  And he said to her, once again, “That’s right, you don’t want love in your life.”

The more we love, the more potential for pain there is.  It is the price we pay for loving.  Last Thursday, I got a call from someone I care about deeply.  He called to tell me that his grown son had committed suicide.  I hurt so much for him.  I just said, “I’m so, so sorry.  There is nothing worse than this.”  And he said, “I wish I could disagree with you, but I can’t.”  Birth a child or adopt a child, get close to a friend, fall in love—this is all very risky stuff.  The only thing more risky is living and dying alone.  That is what I would call never having lived at all. 

I say to you this morning: open your heart.  There is love all around us, all the time, love to be given, to be received.  Don’t let “heart trouble” keep you from it.  If you are willing, love will find you.  That I will promise.

Love takes place most readily in the context of community.  It is drawn from that context, and it radiates far beyond itself.  In the difficult world we find ourselves in, we have to be creative in order to build the kind of community we need.  The Norman Rockwell ideal of the perfect, the self-sufficient family where everyone is happy, and the home is decorated appropriately from one holiday to the next—this ideal is a myth.  Until quite recently in human history, each family was a working unit of the village, and the village was a unit of the tribe.  Everyone worked together, and played together, and prayed together.  This is much the way I experienced the time I stayed in Bali, living in a rice paddy with a Balinese family.  They did not have much in the way of material possessions, but when the sun went down and people went to bed, the silence was deep, and it held me.  I rested, in sync with the land and the tides.  There is no such thing as loneliness in that Balinese village.  Children are passed all day from mothers’ arms to grandfathers, to uncles and aunts and cousins.  It’s not our world, and maybe we don’t want that kind of world, but believing ourselves to be self-sufficient is so wrong, so dangerous.  We are a part of the whole, and we are responsible for the whole.  At our peril, we separate our happiness from the happiness and well-being of all.

Creative solutions.  I was talking with a woman friend of mine, a writer from another cit,y a few months back, and I asked her if she was in a relationship.  She said, “I’m not in a primary relationship right now.  But I am in relationship,” she said.  “I have quite a large house, too large for me, and I was thinking about selling it, but I decided instead to invite another writer, someone I often collaborate with, to live in the second story of my house.  And then I invited another friend to take the third story.  We sometimes share meals, share work, we talk. It feels good to have that human warmth in my house.”

I myself decided that I wanted more life in my house, and so I did two things.  I built an apartment in my basement, which I’m now renting out to a lovely young woman who has her first job as an elementary school teacher.  She loves her work, and comes home singing every day.  I find it very satisfying to provide a nice safe space for someone in my house.  And then I also decided to get a pet.  I went to the Humane Society, thinking that I would get a dog, but the dogs were so—well, extroverted.  I left, telling my friend, “I think I need a more reflective pet.”  He said, “I think you need a cat.”  So I went back and this time got my kitty, whose name is Molly.  She has been a lot of company.  When I was sick recently, she would curl up beside me on the bed and purr and stay for hours. 

Incidentally, a study of nursing homes showed that after introducing pets into these facilities, there were 25% fewer patients being confined to their beds—and 48% less absenteeism of the staff.  Wouldn’t you know—now researchers are testing to see whether electronic pets, robot pets, like the Sony robotic dog AIBO, might offer the same cognitive and emotional benefits to people, without that nasty shedding on the couch.  They should hang up that study and save the money.  The point is that something soft and cuddly feels good, and caring for another living creature gets our life juices flowing.  Oiling a robot just wouldn’t the same.

I want to say a word about the church as a place where we can build community.  We Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about individual rights, about autonomy.  To my way of thinking, we don’t talk nearly enough about community.  How do we protect and nurture the remarkable sense of community we enjoy here at First Unitarian?  The church not only offers us a place to form depth relationships; it also calls us out of our individual, solitary lives into relationship with social and spiritual realities that transcend any one human life.  We are not here just to, or mainly to, recover ourselves, but also to nourish the health and well-being of our civic institutions—school, government, and yes, church.  In church we are reminded of the values we want to live by, and we are challenged to build a new kind of community, a community where everybody is welcome at the welcome table.  We are called into relationship not only with one another, but with the earth, and with the larger society.  As we mature spiritually, we move from asking the question, “What about my needs?” to the question, “What about the needs of our suffering world?  How can I contribute to the healing of our society?” 

As Kermit the Frog says, “It’s not easy being green.”  That is, being ecologically sound, not just in terms of preservation of our earth, but preservation of our moral and spiritual selves, and preservation of institutions, like the church, which are life-affirming.  The church supports us as we risk opening ourselves to the closeness which quite literally gives us life; and it supports us as together we create the kind of world that acknowledges human need over every other value, that puts love and healing at the center of things.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we ask today that our roots would hold us close, that our wings would set us free.  Free of our neediness, free of our fear that if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us.  Let us know our own beauty and goodness, that we might be open to the beauty and goodness of those around us.  Help us to build in this fractured world a place of peace and light and hope.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you leave this place today, take your joy and your generosity of spirit, and give it to the wider world beyond these walls.

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Copyright 2003, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.